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I just joined a poetry group on FB yesterday evening called the Undead Poets Society. As I went over the members list I noticed several friends of friends, and intrigued, I added them as friends. One of them, a fellow from OH, posted this poem by Anne Sexton today, and I felt compelled to respond.

The Truth the Dead Know

by Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

And my response: This year, I lost my father in the spring, and my fiance accompanied me down state to the wake and funeral. Two months later, we attended the wedding of a boy I half-raised. Two months after that, he suddenly died. There are things I could tell you about how the body settles into cold clay when the breath leaves it, but I can’t ever fully explain how your heart stays alive after it loses what it loves. It isn’t that the dead refuse to be blessed; we just don’t know how to bless them so we can let them go.

I put together a program for the service. In lieu of the obituary I had written for the leaflet, I read this poem for him as my eulogy. The music was exquisite, the flow of evening prayer was just as it should have been. I placed cardinals and candles in the windows, and the old rector who knew him chose a special song for the procession to the columbarium. Adam’s ashes were tucked away with his five-year coin beneath the silver bell, and they rang it for him.

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My life has been
a rain dance
bare feet on dry earth
begging for sustenance
one storm at a time

It has rained
over and over again
it has rained
mainly flash floods
washing away the cracks
in the dessicated soil
running away in rivulets
to somewhere else
accompanied by thunder

When I least expected
a soft shower came
a soaking rain
the kind that lingers
the kind that feeds
all the deep places
and wakes the seeds
so that the grass comes
with the scent
of petrichor

It was gone before I knew it
though I savored the time
standing in the full of it
feeling nourished
washed clean
drawing in deep breaths
filled with the smell
of settling dust

It is my path
to keep dancing
knowing more floods will come
muddying my footsteps
with only superficial solution
because the soft showers
are few and far between
their blessing
fragile as a desert flower
opening fragrant
after its passage